Language Resources: The Foundations of a Pan-European Information Society.

Language, once a cultural asset in Europe, has become an economic commodity. The national language institutes now have the task of providing the means for making knowledge available in the national language and distributing locally produced information worldwide. This includes not only training more translators, but also developing the necessary language technology. Current issues in language engineering include development of high-quality, economic document creation and management, creation of better information and communication services, better translation and support of foreign language learning, and internationalization and localization of software for language applications. The quality of language technology applications rests in the comprehensiveness and reliability of the language data with which the tools are used. Corpora are the basic language resources, which exist in a variety of forms, including special, reference, monitor, opportunistic, comparable, and parallel corpora. Building a corpus requires encoding decisions, documentation, and validation; the process is costly. The Trans-European Language Resources Infrastructure (TELRI) is a cooperative effort by language and language technology institutions in 17 countries to supply the natural language processing community with monolingual and multilingual language resources. TELRI will make Europe a strong competitor in the emerging market of language engineering and communication technology. (MSE)